This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
A week ago I was in Boston for the 2013 annual meeting of the History of Science Society. Immediately after the session in which I was a speaker, I attended a session (Sa31 in this program) called "Happiness beyond the Professoriate -- Advising and Embracing Careers Outside the Academy." The discussion there was specifically pitched at people working in the history of science (whether earning their Ph.D.s or advising those who are), but much of it struck me as broadly applicable to people in other fields -- not just fields like philosophy, but also science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
The discourse in the session was framed in terms of recognizing, and communicating, that getting a job just like your advisor's (i.e., as a faculty member at a research university with a Ph.D. program in your field -- or, loosening it slightly, as permanent faculty at a college or university, even one not primarily focused on research or on training new members of the profession at the Ph.D. level) shouldn't be a necessary condition for maintaining your professional identity and place in the professional community. Make no mistake, people in one's discipline (including those training new members of the profession at the Ph.D. level) frequently dodiscount people as no longer really members of the profession for failing to succeed in the One True Career Path, but the panel asserted that they shouldn't.
And, they provided plenty of compelling reasons why the "One True Career Path" approach is problematic. Chief among these, at least in fields like history, is that this approach feeds the creation and growth of armies of adjunct faculty, hoping that someday they will become regular faculty, and in the meantime working for very low wages relative to the amount of work they do (and relative to their training and expertise), experiencing serious job insecurity (sometimes not finding out whether they'll have classes to teach until the academic term is actually underway), and enduring all manner of employer shenanigans (like having their teaching loads reduced to 50% of full time so the universities employing them are not required by law to provide health care coverage). Worse, insistence on One True Career Path fails to acknowledge that happiness is important.
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Panelist Jim Grossman noted that the very language of "alternative careers" reinforces this problematic view by building in the assumption that there is a default career path. Speaking of "alternatives" instead might challenge the assumption that all options other than the default are lesser options.
Grossman identified other bits of vocabulary that ought to be excised from these discussions. He argued against speaking of "the job market" when one really means "the academic job market". Otherwise, the suggestion is that you can't really consider those other jobs without exiting the profession. Talking about "job placement," he said, might have made sense back in the day when the chair of a hiring department called the chair of another department to say, "Send us your best man!" rather than conducting an actual job search. Those days are long gone.
And Grossman had lots to say about why we should stop talking about "overproduction of Ph.D.s."
Ph.D.s, he noted, are earned by people, not produced like widgets on a factory line. Describing the number of new Ph.D.-holders each year as overproduction is claiming that there are too many -- but again, this is too many relative to a specific kind of career trajectory assumed implicitly to be the only one worth pursuing. There are many sectors in the career landscape that could benefit from the talents of these Ph.D.-holders, so why are we not describing the current situation as one of "underconsumption of Ph.D.s"? Finally, the "overproduction of Ph.D.s." locution doesn't seem helpful in a context where these seems to be no good way to stop departments from "producing" as many Ph.D.s as they want to. If market forces were enough to address this imbalance, we wouldn't have armies of adjuncts.
Someone in the discussion pointed out that STEM fields have for some time had similar issues of Ph.D. supply and demand, suggesting that they might be ahead of the curve in developing useful responses which other disciplines could borrow. However, the situation in STEM fields differs in that industrial career paths have been treated as legitimate (and as not removing you from the profession). And, more generally, society seems to take the skills and qualities of mind developed during a STEM Ph.D. as useful and broadly applicable, while those developed during a history or philosophy Ph.D. are assumed to be hopelessly esoteric. However, it was noted that while STEM fields don't generate the same armies of adjuncts as humanities field, they do have what might be described as the "endless postdoc" problem.
Given that structural stagnation of the academic job market is real (and has been reality for something like 40 years in the history of science), panelist Lynn Nyhart observed that it would be foolish for Ph.D. students not to consider -- and prepare for -- other kinds of jobs. As well, Nyhart argues that as long as faculty take on graduate students, they have a responsibility to help them find jobs.
Despite profession that they are essentially clueless about career paths other than academia, advisors do have resources they can draw upon in helping their graduate students. Among these is the network of Ph.D. alumni from their graduate program, as well as the network of classmates from their own Ph.D. training. Chances are that a number of people in these networks are doing a wide range of different things with their Ph.D.s -- and that they could provide valuable information and contacts. (Also, keeping in contact with these folks recognizes that they are still valued members of your professional community, rather than treating them as dead to you if they did not pursue the One True Career Path.)
Nyhart also recommended Versatilephd.com, especially the PhD Career Finder tab, as a valuable resource for exploring the different kinds of work for which Ph.D.s in various fields can serve as preparation. Some of the good stuff on the site is premium content, but if your university subscribes to the site your access to that premium content may already be paid for.
Nyhart noted that preparing Ph.D. students for a wide range of careers doesn't require lowering discipline-specific standards, nor changing the curriculum -- although, as Grossman pointed out, it might mean thinking more creatively about what skills, qualities of mind, and experiences existing courses impart. After all, skills that are good training for a career in academia -- being a good teacher, an effective committee member, an excellent researcher, a persuasive writer, a productive collaborator -- are skills that are portable to other kinds of careers.
David Attis, who has a Ph.D. in history of science and has been working in the private sector for about a decade, mentioned some practical skills worth cultivating for Ph.D.s pursuing private sector careers. These include having a tight two-minute explanation of your thesis geared to a non-specialist audience, being able to demonstrate your facility in approaching and solving non-academic problems, and being able to work on the timescale of business, not thesis writing (i.e., five hours to write a two-page memo is far too slow). Attis said that private sector employers are looking for people who can work well on teams and who can be flexible in contexts beyond teaching and research.
I found the discussion in this session incredibly useful, and I hope some of the important issues raised there will find their way to the graduate advisors and Ph.D. students who weren't in the room for it, no matter what their academic discipline.